Some parks whisper. Highlands Hammock State Park sings.
It begins the moment you turn off US-27 onto Hammock Road, the traffic falling away behind you like a shed skin. Before you even see the official sign, the landscape shifts: more oaks, more shadows, more sense that you’re entering an older, wiser Florida—one that existed long before citrus groves and subdivisions, before even the pioneers, all the way back to when giant sloths moved like shadows through the underbrush.
That’s the Highlands Hammock promise: you’re about to walk into one of the last and finest remnants of ancient Florida jungle.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Getting There: The Naturalist’s Pilgrimage Route
If you’re coming from Sarasota—as I often do—your journey takes you inland, away from the salt breath of the Gulf and deep into the rolling ranchlands of central Florida.
Here’s my preferred route:
From Sarasota:
- Take I-75 North briefly to Exit 217 (SR 70 East).
- Follow SR 70 for roughly 65 miles through Myakka prairie, cattle country, and a sky big enough to set your soul straight.
- Turn north on US-27 at the Lake Placid interchange.
- Continue about 14 miles to Sebring.
- At Sebring, turn left onto Hammock Road (CR-634) and follow it 4 miles straight into the park entrance.
Total travel time: about 1 hour 45 minutes, not counting stops to gawk at sandhill cranes or pull over for a photo of mist drifting across a cow pasture like a ghost herd.
Coming from Tampa, Orlando, Naples, or Lake Okeechobee is similarly easy—Highlands Hammock sits squarely in the center of the peninsula, as if Florida’s heart were wrapped in green velvet.
And when you arrive, the message is clear: Welcome to primeval Florida.
First Impressions: Entering the Hammock
A few state parks in Florida give you the immediate sensation of stepping into a living cathedral—Highlands Hammock is at the top of that list.
The entrance road is a corridor of towering live oaks, their branches draped in Spanish moss that sways like ancient ceremonial banners. The air cools, the light softens, and the sweet, earthy scent of leaf litter and swamp water drifts through your car windows.
This is a tropical hardwood hammock—one of the most biologically rich habitats in the state. And Highlands Hammock preserves some of the oldest and most pristine examples anywhere, a staggering green labyrinth that has remained nearly untouched for centuries.
The first thing I always do is roll down every window, slow to a crawl, and let the hammock greet me on its own terms.
Top Eight Features of Highlands Hammock State Park
There are many things you can love about this place, but eight stand out as the pillars of the park—its wonders, its signatures, its stories.
1. The Elevated Boardwalk Over the Cypress Swamp
This is the star of the show.
A long, winding, photogenic boardwalk takes you deep into a primeval cypress swamp, where ancient knees rise like gnarled sculptures and the water mirrors the canopy in perfect, trembling symmetry.
Here you smell the tannins.
Here you hear nothing but barred owls, pig frogs, and the tiny splash of a sunning turtle dropping into the water.
Some parts of the boardwalk are delightfully narrow and a bit uneven—more adventure than walkway. In heavy rains, water flows over small sections, making it feel like you’re walking on the edge of creation.
2. The Big Oak: One of Florida’s Largest Live Oaks
This tree is a king among trees.
With a trunk that looks like it’s been carved by centuries of storms, fungi, insects, and time itself, the Big Oak is believed to be more than 1,000 years old. That means it sprouted when the Calusa Empire soared along the Gulf Coast and before the first Europeans even imagined Florida.
Its limbs spread outward in great, muscular curves. Standing beneath it is an exercise in perspective: you feel marvelously small.
3. The Ancient Cabbage Palm
This is one of the largest and oldest cabbage palms in the entire state—possibly in the entire Southeast. It looks like something out of the Pleistocene, with a trunk wider than a black bear and a crown like a broad-feathered headdress.
This palm has survived lightning, hurricanes, floods, and the slow turning of ages. If palms could talk, this one would speak with a voice like rolling thunder.
4. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Museum
Highlands Hammock was one of Florida’s earliest state parks and a major CCC project in the 1930s.
The museum is small but beautifully curated, filled with artifacts, photos, and stories about the young men who—during the Great Depression—carved trails, built bridges, planted trees, and shaped the park we know today.
As a naturalist, I treasure the CCC’s role in Florida’s conservation. They were the original “boots on the ground” environmentalists.
5. The Tram Tour Through Wildlife Hotspots
Few state parks still operate a tram tour, and Highlands Hammock’s is a gem.
Guides take you behind gated areas into restricted wildlife zones—open marshes and remote hammocks where alligators sun on the banks, deer browse casually, barred owls hoot in daylight, and, if you’re lucky, a Florida panther or bobcat slips through the palmettos like a shadow with paws.
It’s one of the best wildlife experiences in Florida—especially for photographers.
6. The Hickory Trail and Its Wild “Cathedral” of Trees
This trail feels enchanted.
You walk through a corridor of towering hickories, magnolias, and oaks, some of them so big they redefine your internal scale. Sunbeams pour through the canopy like golden spears. In the early morning, the whole place glows with a kind of emerald luminosity that makes you think of Celtic myths.
7. The Wild Orange Groves
Scattered around the park are patches of old, feral orange trees, descendants of pioneer-era groves. Their scent in springtime is an intoxicating cloud of blossom sweetness. Some trees bear small, tart, incredibly aromatic fruit—the original “Florida orange,” the kind early settlers juiced, candied, and cooked with.
If you happen across one, stand still and breathe deeply. You’re inhaling Florida history.
8. The Alligator-Lined Shallow Waters of the Marsh Trail
This short trail is where I’ve had some of my closest alligator encounters.
Don’t worry—the gators are doing their thing, minding their own business, warming themselves in the sun. But seeing them lined along the banks like Jurassic sentinels is unforgettable.
In winter you might see twenty at once, from burly old bulls to little juveniles with golden stripes.
This is the real Florida—raw, beautiful, undiluted.
A Naturalist’s Wander: Scenes and Encounters
Now let me take you through the park the way I usually do—as a wandering observer.
Into the Swamp
I always start with the cypress boardwalk. The minute my boots hit its old planks, the world changes.
An anhinga dries its wings on a stump, feathers gleaming like wet black lace. Dragonflies shimmer like tiny blue lanterns. A red-shouldered hawk screams somewhere overhead—a sharp, wild punctuation to the swamp’s otherwise hushed grammar.
As I walk, I follow the mirrored surface of the water. Beneath it, gar drift like prehistoric submarines. Above it, swallow-tailed kites sometimes circle in the summer sky like feathered crescents of living light.
The Heart of the Hammock
Moving into the hardwood hammock is like stepping into a botanical opera.
There are palmettos everywhere, their fronds clattering softly in a breeze. Scarlet skinks dart across logs. Big, knotted live oaks spread vast lattices of shade across the forest floor.
Highlands Hammock is one of the closest things we have to old-growth Florida. I always feel that if I stand still long enough, I’ll hear the ghosts of mastodons crunching leaves in the distance.
Wildlife Theatre
Every visit brings a show.
Once, I watched a mother white-tailed deer with her fawn feeding in a patch of wildflowers. On another trip, a barred owl swooped down silently and snagged a frog from the marsh, flying off with a low hoot that sounded suspiciously like bragging.
And of course, the alligators. They’re everywhere—sometimes three feet from the trail, lying as still as sunbaked statues. Respect their space, give them room, and they will give you the rare privilege of observing a species unchanged since the age of dinosaurs.
Flora of Highlands Hammock
The park is an ark of plant life, representing some of Florida’s rarest habitats.
Trees and Large Plants
- Live oak
- Swamp tupelo
- Bald cypress
- Cabbage palm (including enormous ancestral palms)
- Red maple
- Hickory species
- Southern magnolia
- Longleaf pine
- Slash pine
Smaller Plants and Understory
- Saw palmetto
- Royal fern
- Cinnamon fern
- Wax myrtle
- Beggar-ticks (Bidens alba)
- Wild coffee
- American beautyberry
- Coontie (ancient cycad)
- Resurrection fern
- Epiphytes: Spanish moss, ball moss, wild orchids, airplants (Tillandsia species)
Seasonal Blooms
- Swamp lily
- Spider lily
- Coreopsis
- Wild azalea (in some hammock areas)
- Tickseed
- Sunflower and goldenrod species
Fauna of Highlands Hammock
This is where the park truly shines. Few Florida parks pack such a diversity of wildlife into a single green tapestry.
Birds
- Barred owl
- Red-shouldered hawk
- Swallow-tailed kite (summer)
- Pileated woodpecker
- Anhinga
- Great blue heron
- Limpkin
- Blue-gray gnatcatcher
- Northern cardinal
- Eastern towhee
- Carolina wren
- Wild turkey
Mammals
- White-tailed deer
- Bobcat
- Raccoon
- Gray squirrel
- River otter
- Marsh rabbit
- Florida panther (rare, but occasionally sighted on the tram route)
Reptiles and Amphibians
- American alligator
- Peninsula cooter
- Florida softshell turtle
- Green anole
- Brown water snake
- Pig frog
- Southern leopard frog
- Oak toad
Insects and Invertebrates
- Zebra longwing (state butterfly)
- Gulf fritillary
- Eastern tiger swallowtail
- Lubber grasshopper
- Various dragonflies (blue dasher, Eastern pondhawk, scarlet skimmer)
Final Thoughts: Leaving Without Truly Leaving
As the day turns late and the hammock shifts into its evening register—deeper shadows, a subtle drop in temperature, crickets tuning their nighttime orchestra—I often find myself reluctant to leave. Highlands Hammock doesn’t just show you Florida; it reminds you what Florida is beneath the layers of highways and development: a wild, breathing, ancient garden.
Driving back down the entrance road, past the moss-curtained oaks, I always roll the windows down again—one last inhalation of that rich, dark, leaf-laced air.
Because Highlands Hammock stays with you.
In your lungs.
In your ears.
In your imagination.
And in your sense of what it means to belong to the land.